Our research aims to describe genres of assessed writing at British universities (ESRC RES-000-23-0800). To this end we have developed a corpus of 2800 texts from four years of study across four broad disciplinary groupings. Our research design integrates a corpus linguistic account of formal features in the corpus with an ethnographic investigation of the disciplinary context, a multi-dimensional analysis of register, and a functional linguistic analysis of genres.
In this paper I illustrate this design with examples from history and engineering. The contextual information shows that history students write mostly essays, written as pedagogical genres, while engineering students engage in a wide range of written assignments: scientific papers are written as if to report findings to an academic audience; funding proposals are written as if to persuade a professional readership; posters are designed to inform a lay audience (e.g. visitors to a transport museum); and reflective journals are written for personal and professional development. The writing process also differs. Some assignments are written individually whereas others involve teamwork.